Warming and worry go AWOL

Some stories this week that show global warming aka climate change is beginning to fade away as an issue.

From the 3C Headlines blog:

Global satellite temperatures confirm hiatus of global warming, while the general public and mainstream press are beginning to recognise what climate sceptics long ago identified…global temperatures are trending towards cooling, not accelerating higher.

Per The Economist magazine and other major mainstream media outlets, it’s now obvious the conventional, “consensus” global warming meme promulgated by taxpayer-funded researchers is no longer robust – even for the MSM press-release puppets it would appear.

The graph on the right is a depiction of global temperatures as reported by The Economist (pink CO2 curve superimposed by ‘C3′). And The Economist and their mainstream press brethern are not alone in challenging the failed AGW orthodoxy: here and here.

While the majority of “journalists” are still awakening from their intellectual slumber regarding climate science, the latest empirical global temperature measurements (RSS atmosphere temps and CO2 chart on the left) confirm what The Economist is essentially reporting – global warming has gone AWOL and a slight cooling trend has developed over the last 10 years (a minus 0.42 degrees by 2100 if the trend persists).

This warming hiatus happened despite the loud and hysterical shrieking by the climate scientists on the public dole that current CO2 emissions would cause rapid, unequivocal, irrefutable accelerated warming.

And not only are the falling temperatures invalidating the IPCC’s AGW hypothesis, a new Pew poll reports the public support of the global warming hysteria is dropping like a rock – down to only 33%.

Conclusions:

1. Global warming has gone AWOL over last 10 years, per the satellite record

2. Cumulating CO2 emissions in the atmosphere have had a minor impact on global temperatures over the last 20 years

3. The mainstream press, as represented by The Economist, and other proponents of convential climate orthodoxy are moving closer to the AGW skeptics’ (lukewarmers’) position

We’re reaching the point where climate predictions have been around long enough to allow for significant comparison against the actual data, and we are now able to say definitively that the predictions were horribly exaggerated.

Many years ago, I remember thinking that it would take many years to refute the panicked claims about global warming. Unlike most political movements, which content themselves with making promises about, say, what the unemployment rate will be in two years if we pass a giant stimulus bill—claims that are proven wrong (and how!) relatively quickly—the environmentalists had successfully managed to put their claims so far off into the future that it would take decades to test them against reality.

But guess what? The decades are finally here.

At Forbes, Harry Binswanger dates the beginning of the campaign to 1979 and puts it in an amusing perspective.

“Remember 1979? That was the year of ‘We Are Family’ by Sister Sledge, of ‘The Dukes of Hazard’ on TV, and of Kramer vs. Kramer on the silver screen. It was the year the Shah was forced out of Iran. It was before the web, before the personal computer, before the cell phone, before voicemail and answering machines. But not before the global warming campaign.

“In January of 1979, a New York Times article was headlined: ‘Experts Tell How Antarctic Ice Could Cause Widespread Floods.’…

“So where’s the warming? Where are the gondolas pulling up to the Capitol? Where are the encroaching seas in Florida? Or anywhere? Where is the climate change which, for 33 years, has been just around the corner?”

He concludes that “I’ve grown old waiting for the promised global warming.” Literally: “I was 35 when predictions of a looming ice age were supplanted by warmmongering. Now I’m 68, and there’s still no sign of warmer weather.”

He puts the issue in terms of common-sense observation. But it can also be measured in terms of hard data. We’re reaching the point where the predictions have been around long enough to allow for significant comparison against the actual data, and we are now able to say definitively that the predictions were horribly exaggerated.

Steven Hayward points to signs that even advocates of the global warming hysteria are starting to backtrack.

“The new issue of The Economist has a long feature on the declining confidence in the high estimates of climate sensitivity. That this appears in The Economist is significant, because this august British news organ has been fully on board with climate alarmism for years now. A Washington-based Economist correspondent admitted to me privately several years ago that the senior editors in London had mandated consistent and regular alarmist climate coverage in its pages.

“The problem for the climateers is increasingly dire. As The Economist shows in its first chart (Figure 1 here), the recent temperature record is now falling distinctly to the very low end of its predicted range and may soon fall out of it, which means the models are wrong, or, at the very least, that there’s something going on that supposedly ‘settled’ science hasn’t been able to settle.”

See a better version of that graph here, which makes it clear that the actual predictions in the graph date only to about 2006—and they are already being proven wrong.

You know, you can really manipulate a graph to spin the data, for example, by manipulating the scale to “zoom in” and make something look bigger or “zoom out” to make it look smaller. We’re used to seeing the zoomed-in version of global temperature measurements, so it’s nice to see this zoomed-out version:

Rather than narrowing in to measure minor variations from the long-term average, which makes annual variations of a few tenths of a degree look enormous, this one zooms out to show us the data in terms of absolute temperature measurements, in which the annual variations over the past 15 years look as insignificant as they really are.

So basically, all that the global warming advocates really have, as the evidentiary basis for their theory, is that global temperatures were a little higher than usual in the late 1990s. That’s it. Which proves nothing. The climate varies, just as weather varies, and as far as we can tell, this is all well within the normal range.

That has been one of my complaints about the global warming scare since the very beginning. We only have systematic global temperature measurements going back about 150 years, which on the relevant timescale—a geological time-scale—is a blink of an eye. Moreover, the measurement methods for these global temperatures have been not been entirely consistent, making them susceptible to changes due to everything from a different paint used on the outside of the weather station to the “urban heat island” effect that happens when a weather station in the middle of a field is surrounded over the years by parking lots. And somehow, among all the billions spent on global warming research, not much money seems to have made its way to the enormous international effort that would be required to ensure the accurate and consistent measurement of global temperatures.

So we have not been able to establish what ought to be the starting point for any theory about global temperatures: a baseline for what is a normal global temperature and what is a natural variation in temperature.

In an effort to fill in this gap—without ever admitting what a fundamental problem it is—the alarmists have made several attempts to patch together a much longer record of global temperatures, going back thousands of years. Michael Mann set the tone for this with his infamous “hockey stick” graph purporting to show temperatures going back 1,000 years, with recent temperatures spiking up ominously like the blade on a hockey stick.

But Mann’s hockey stick came under withering fire for its dodgy statistical methods and selective use of data and has since been pretty much abandoned. But that hasn’t kept the warmists from trying again, this time with a new graph, named after lead study author Shaun Marcott, purporting to show global temperatures over the past 11,300 years, this time with a new, even bigger “blade” to the hockey stick showing the supposed upward thrust of temperatures in the past 100 years.

‘As The Economist shows in its first chart, the recent temperature record is now falling distinctly to the very low end of its predicted range and may soon fall out of it, which means the models are wrong, or, at the very least, that there’s something going on that supposedly “settled” science hasn’t been able to settle. Equally problematic for the theory, one place where the warmth might be hiding—the oceans—is not cooperating with the story line. Recent data show that ocean warming has noticeably slowed, too, as shown’

110 thoughts on “Warming and worry go AWOL”

Wow , this guy was on the nose.
In 2006 Chabibullo Abdussamatow of the Pulkovo Observatory and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences said global warming had already reached its peak and that reduced solar activity would start the Earth on a cooling phase.
According to Ria Novosti here:
‘With respect to solar activity, the increase in energy emission was indeed the most important event of the 20th century,’ the scientist said.”
and:
The start of the temperature decline can be expected in 2012 or 2013 according to the scientist. By 2035 or 2045 the strength of the sun will again reach a minimum. A strong cold will then grip the Earth 15 to 20 years later.

I dispute the conclusion: Cumulating CO2 emissions in the atmosphere have had a minor impact on global temperatures over the last 20 years.
I do not think this can be concluded from what little evidence has been given. There is no evidence of any whatsoever!
If as the warmists claim some unspecified “natural variability” is now dominant it could also have been dominant 20 or more years ago. This earlier warming was predicted by many but denied by the warmists – who now try to deny their denial in support of their gravy train.
It seems to me the double deniers are wrong and will be frozen into oblivion as solar activity goes off a cliff hand in hand with the AMO and solar magnetic field in the coming years.
Stay Cool!
You have no choice.

The Economist graph doesn’t even show the horribly wrong “really scary” predictions.
It only shows the non-scary predictions entering the region where they are so wrong they shouldn’t even be published.

I hope so, but I doubt it. Already the disease has adapted via the ‘extreme weather’ mutation in an effort to survive. I suspect that politicians and propagandists will still be beating this drum for long decades after the observations have made it plain that CAGW was never anything more than a phantom.

But…but….the science is settled!!!!!
In my opinion “the science is settled” has to be one of the most stupid statements ever uttered. Science is never settled.
If truth was easy to grasp, honesty would be a lot easier than it is. In actual fact, eels are easier to grasp than the truth.
Attempting to put my ideas about this topic down in an essay, I wrote something called “Uninvented History.” http://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/uninvented-history/

Looks like Marcott et al might have been the last straw as far a catastrophist credibililtiy goes. There will be people asking whose side he was on…
But we are not out of the woods yet. The FUD cannon is locked and loaded with Extreme Weather. A much fuzzier concept than global warming. The Henny Pennies have not run out of potential disasters with which to control and tax us yet.

It is interesting that C3 suggests a -0.42 anomaly by 2100. Compare that with the conclusions of my earlier recent post on this site 4/2/13 “Global Cooling- Methods and Testable Decadal Predictions ” see esp #5
1 Significant temperature drop at about 2016-17
2 Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22
3 Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
4 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 – 0.15
5 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 – 0.5
6 General Conclusion – by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
7 By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
8 The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial – they may slightly ameliorate the forecast cooling and help maintain crop yields .
9 Warning !! There are some signs in the Livingston and Penn Solar data that a sudden drop to the Maunder
Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures could be imminent – with a much more rapid and economically disruptive cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario.

A sixty year cycle in global temperature is evident, and may be linked to solar cycle lengths. And we’re at a peak in that cycle.
If natural variability is to be blamed for nullifying the effects of CO2 during the downswing, being thus equal in magnitude and opposite, natural variability would probably have represented half or more of the temperature increases of the 1970-2000 time period, also equal to CO2 effects but with the same direction.
Making the assumptions of climate sensitivity twice as large as they should have been.

Look for nutty fringe alarmists to threaten lawsuits against those media who say the alarmist climate illusion is ebbing, e.g. Hansen the former GISS (of NASA) head who aims to revive the alarmist movement through suits.
Nutty till the end.
John

Well, now that Hansen has more free time to pursue his litigation and anti-establishment protesting with his rich Hollywood eco-followers, I predict you will see a star-studded “Concert for the Climate” (aka Climate-stock) featuring Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, and 10 dancing Polar Bears…this, in an attempt to gain more public attention. Maybe they can do it in Vostok, Antarctica…

Yes, some MSM outlets are beginning to question – question! – the meme of rapid, accelerating man made warming. But the upper echelons – those august scientific bodies, government scientists and others in positions of influence – are not.
I have yet to see even one step taken back by the likes of Mann, Schmidt, Santer, Hansen, Gore or the chief scientists who advise governments, or the policy makers themselves. To them, nothing has changed – or can change. Expect an exceedingly long, drawn out end game.

If the present trend continues into the next century, admittedly a big “if”, we will have a ridiculously stable climate. You’d think that would be something the consensualists would celebrate. But NOOOOOO! They are all walking around with their tails between their legs.
Big letdown. They thought they could save the world and now it appears that the world is saving itself. Or was it that there really was nothing to worry about in the first place?
Forgive me for getting ahead of future climate changes here (as 20 years of data proves, no one knows what the hell is going on with climate) but the scenario was just to appealing to pass up.

Earth’s atmosphere is not a ‘greenhouse’ and CO2 concentration has fleetingly little to contribute to the heat content or make influence on the energy balance. The current hiatus of ‘global’ temperature increase and the increasing concentration of CO2 give a simple refutation, by example, to the so-called Climate ‘Science’ and AGW to the dismay and horror of the devoutly faithful flock.

So it’s taken 33 yrs for some of the “we’re concerned for the planet” alarmists to rethink the climates sensitivity to CO2.
In another 33 yrs the rest of us will realise that CO2 causes NO warming whatsoever, that CO2 is a refrigerant, and that ours would be an overheated unlivable planet were it not for (so called) GHGs such as H2O and CO2.
Too bad I won’t be around to gloat.

People are not as stupid as the scientists believe. We have had so many scare stories from “scientists” concerning their pet projects, that in my view the public have become immune.
We have had scare story after scare story (passive smoking, AGW, AIDS, alcohol, bird flu etc )
Every scare story always goes through the following process
1) Initial publicity
2) Outrageous claims
3) Various studies which only show evidence supporting the scare (studies showing that tobacco slows the onset of Parkinsons Disease and Alzheimers disease were suppressed).
4) A whole raft of “Experts” emerges who predict catastrophic loss of life, usually in nice round figures ending in at least five zeroes
5) These same “experts” always say it is worse than we thought and something must be done with much self righteous hand wringing
6) Government policy is changed as a result
7) The “experts” shut up
AGW is probably the most blatant of these scares, because we are all aware of the weather (I do know that weather and climate are not the same thing, but when you suffer from 3 months of well below average temperatures it is only human to question whether the world is warming!).
Hopefully we are seeing the end of the AGW scare that is costing us all a great deal of money and sadly costing some of our elderly, their lives.

I am really going to enjoy the next few years as all the warmists backpedal to their escape hatches, yes watch them all scramble to duck and hide as they make references to their use of the words ‘could’ and ‘may’ and ‘might’. Have some popcorn and enjoy the show, folks!

There has been no “hiatus” in global warming. A hiatus is a gap in an otherwise continuous trend. There is no evidence that the post-1996 standstill is a gap or a hole or a hiatus or a lull. The 1990s warming episode simple stopped – and has remained stopped for almost as long as the original trending period.
That particular temp episode is now history and is most unlikely to simply reappear.
Next time the world warms (which might be soon or far in the future) will likely be a whole new episode.

I hate to pop anybody’s bubble on this sunny, bright Friday but now is not yet the time to put those sunglasses on and head for the golf course (unless, of course, you’re the President). Hate to say it, but there are oodles and oodles of thoroughly mediocre scientists who conflate fame and proficiency as being one and the same thing. They’re not going to willingly jump head first into the sharp, whirling blades of a wind turbine like they expect the rest of us to do. And they, sure as hell, have no desire to join the rest of us schlubs in line at the unemployment compensation office. (Yeah, I know that the unemployment rate is magically going down despite the fact that food stamp applications have mysteriously gone up.)
More to the point: Carbon taxes are coming. Just like the income tax, they’re the goose that laid the golden egg. And it’s an unfortunate fact that that’s how The One originally hoped to pay for his ObamaCare. In the original cap & trade proposal The One wanted to auction off the initial carbon credits as they entered the market place. That was the stealth tax for “free” national health. Now, they’ve got a problem, the deficit is (to use a popular environmental word) unsustainable and the health plan, judiciously delayed until after the election, is starting kick in. I suspect the deficits were deliberately intended to create a crisis so as to force through whopper tax increases. And, what the heck, we’ll all blame the utility companies and fossil fuel industry anyway.
For the time being, enjoy the good news and the weekend. But keep your eyes open come Monday.

“Its not nice to try to fool or fake out Mother Nature!”
For sure with wimpey, fake, home made, grant seeking, ego boosting, weak tree ring wood Hockey Sticks.
As all should know science and hockey are real and if you enter either rink and try to play in the big leagues with fake abilities, fake data, fake scoreing ability, you just might get a mean old hip check by Mother Nature and her earth bound assistants.

The only way it seems to get the attention of Catastrophic climate change believers is to raise questions about CO2 sensitivity. Simply because the last 15-20 years depending on the data set puts the current favoured calculation into doubt. It doesn’t matter whether what we are seeing now is only “masking the global warming signal” it’s still over riding it and that is enough for me, they also have no idea why it’s masking it. Whatever it is that is masking it. It may be settled that CO2 can effect temperature, and I don’t think any reasonable skeptic would doubt that. It’s certainly not settled how much CO2 affects temperature.

This is no surprise. All through this silly debate the thing that has been missing is an appreciation of the fact that the physical heat that is alleged to pass from heated co2 into the ocean to be stored and provide backup heat, cannot in fact do so because of surface tension. There is a world of difference between applying heat to the bottom of a pot and applying it to the top. Now that the sun has gone quiet the backup that the warmists thought was there is in fact not there. The ocean only accepts “heat” via radiation thats it.

Folks, you’re celebrating too early. Climate alarmists are only backing down for the time being because the Machine is busy moving hard on gay rights, taking guns away, and making sure illegals get into the country. As soon as they get their wins on those issues, and they will, they’ll be right back to climate change, cap and trade, carbon taxes, and whatever else it takes to grind us all into the ground while increasing their wealth and power.
Remember, in America there are about 3000 of them running 320 million of us. We should be marching.

“Baker has worn many hats — including Senate Majority Leader, White House Chief of Staff (for President Reagan), and Ambassador to Japan. Baker was a close friend of the late Alvin Weinberg, who directed ORNL for 18 years, and he frequently was a champion for Oak Ridge’s federally funded programs.”
time and nature are clearly erroding the foundations of AGW fear mongering but…. those piles were driven incredibly deep. The politicians behind the corruption of climate science as evidenced in Marcott contnue to tend their garden to their last days. They do not wear sandals, have shaggy hair, or listen to Bob Marley but they have been orchestrating the AGW scare since it’s inception.

pottereaton says:
April 5, 2013 at 8:06 am
If the present trend continues into the next century, admittedly a big “if”, we will have a ridiculously stable climate. …
—-
Possibly that will be one of the future memes. I can just see the headlines now. CO2 Emissions Causing Climate Stagnation and several bleeding edge papers showing how we will all suffer and die as a result sometime off in the future unless emissions are cut immediately.

dbstealey, the graph you link to is great. Someone with some graphical skills should turn that into a icon for skepticism. The Team has their hockey stick — skeptics should have a simple powerful graphical representation of our argument. The graphics that the Economist use are too complicated and don’t rise to the level of being iconic.

Joe Public says: April 5, 2013 at 8:17 am
The illustrations of Temperature Graphs / Time lack impact by not showing CO2 emissions as well.
Can anyone provide a link to combination graphs please?
Try looking at the graphs that came with this article.

“Thank you, Ambassador Baker for that warm introduction and for all the good work you and the University of Tennessee are sponsoring through the Baker Center for Public Policy. I also want to thank Representative Hamilton and the Wilson Center for hosting this event on such an important topic.
I’d like to talk with you this afternoon about the role nuclear power plays in our efforts to make America and the world more energy secure.” and “And it is central to my efforts as Secretary of Energy to help develop and bring to market safe, clean, reliable sources of energy that can serve as alternatives to the imported fossil fuels on which America must currently rely. This is one of the reasons we have put so much emphasis on bringing about a nuclear renaissance here in the United States.” Bodman, Former Sec Energy
Baker has represented nuclear interests domestically and around the globe since his earliest days. He brokered and tends the coalition between Environmental groups like the NRDC and nuclear interests. That is why the hocky stick emerged after the useful tools Marcott and Shakun had their work run through ORNL’s supercomputer. If one can be judged by “the strenght of their enemies” you are powerful indeed.

…and that’s what I hate about this “science”…….trends
Sea levels…trends……if it doesn’t stop you end up with huge mountains of water out there…and huge holes
Global warming…..trends…..if it doesn’t stop we end up a huge ball of fire
…at some point it has to stop

The trouble with the “Falling Off the Scale” graph is the appearance that CO2 NEVER rose as per IPCC models. It is a scaling problem that the other, “Hiatus”, graph handles better but still not well. The first Falling Off exaggerates the non-fit while the Hiatus one exaggerates the fit.
The temperature rise is supposed to be roughly linear (in the short-term) to the rise of CO2. The rise of CO2 could be rescaled so that the rates of rise are equal for the 70s & 80s. With that alleged causitive correlation, we would see how the post 80s temperatures – the time when CO2 was supposed to start its terrible crimes – fared compared to projections.
A better one, however, is total CO2 emissions. Although I believe that Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and now even the governments of the world purposely exaggerate their CO2 emissions (allow the benefit of doubt to always favour higher numbers, for the NGOs can shriek about CO2 danger and governments can impose taxes based on the threat), CO2 total emissions vs temperature rise is THE graph. The ppmv CO2 in the atmosphere is reasonably thought to have a linear relationship to emissions and hence temperatures; if emissions are rising faster than ppmv rise, the world is “adapting” (or the numbers are exaggerated). So the problem, again, is not in keeping with the narrative.

The graph I want to see:
Annual Max T, Min T, for both the most and least energetic {Hottest and Coldest} inhabited Earthly sites and Global ‘Avg’ T. Reliable 0200 hrs Siberia and 1400 hrs Sahara information, for the past century.
John

Australis says:
April 5, 2013 at 8:18 am
There has been no “hiatus” in global warming. A hiatus is a gap in an otherwise continuous trend. There is no evidence that the post-1996 standstill is a gap or a hole or a hiatus or a lull. The 1990s warming episode simple stopped – and has remained stopped for almost as long as the original trending period.

I agree that we need to be very careful of the language. Many of us argue that the climate exhibits both long term and short term variability that is simply being underrepresented in the GCMs. This is typical of the failure of modern science. Step 1 — we develop a capability to measure something. Step 2 — we measure it. Step 3 — we observe variability of the thing we are measuring and leap to a conclusion that its a statistically significant trend. You can’t make such a conclusion without being able to characterize system variability.
If we can’t characterize climate variability at a 100 year resolution, than we can’t say that the warming that we saw in the late 20th century was due to anything other than natural system variability. Similarly, we can conclude nothing from the recent lack of a trend (except that the GCMs are wrong). The recent lack of a trend could also to be natural variability. How do we know? We don’t.
So we should resist language like “hiatus” and instead note that the climate is exhibiting natural variation greater than that recognized by the consensus models.

marcvsbarcvs says April 5, 2013 at 7:42 am
…
As recently as Wednesday this week – in APRIL – a 26 year old university graduate, who was staying in an unheated derelict house researching a documentary on homelessness, died of hypothermia:
…..http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-22042626

Well, if it is actually cooling, and CO2 causes warming (settled science and all), then logically we need to burn more fossils fuels, not less, to save the planet. We also need to pass a carbon-less tax on those who are building wind farms, solar farms, driving electric cars, using ethanol, etc.

regardless of how many times it is stated, people still equate weather with climate. The drop in polls is probably more due to the cool spring the eastern US and Europe has had than with any actual quantitative data. But perhaps the data will bleed through the screen of the MSM to the people as the climate “malaise” continues.

Vince Causey, you write “But the upper echelons – those august scientific bodies, government scientists and others in positions of influence – are not.”
Not quite. The Royal Society has agreed to a meeting, to discuss the pause, proposed by Lord Lawson. I have not seen a date yet, but it could be an interesting meeting.
The Americal Physical Society has appointed a panel to look at it’s statement on CAGW, and it is largely composed of the usual warmists; the “fix” is also in by way of the terms of reference. But there is a ringer on the panel; Judith Curry. The results of these discussions could also be interesting.

dbstealey @: April 5, 2013 at 8:38 am – Thanks.
Steve Keohane @: April 5, 2013 at 8:52 am – Thanks too. In the UK we have a series of ads with the tagline “Should have gone to Specsavers” (an opticians). Applies to me!

JDN says: April 5, 2013 at 7:41 am Why is the Economist bailing out?
Perhaps they want to stay in business. If you keep preaching that X is increasing in value. and the people buying your magazine invest money in X, and S continues to go DOWN, in a big way, you are going to lose customers. Have never read the “Economist,” other than this article. From its title I assume it is trying to provide information to people that are making decisions on how, and where to spend and/or invest. Their audience/subscription base is only as good as the information they provide. People will not pay to read/eat s*** once they realize it is S***, regardless of how it is presented.

Income tax was originally applied to fund a war but after the war income tax stayed.
The carbon taxes may be just the same.
Governments will take whatever they need, however they can, unless voters as a whole select low tax governments but in light of the large proportion of the voter base that either relies on welfare or is employed by the state that isn’t going to happen.
When the inevitable economic collapse occurs the government and its supplicants will protect themselves first even if that involves complete debauching of the currency.
Artifically low interest rates combined with the printing of new money that is not backed by goods or services allows inflation ahead of investment returns and thus is a slow motion confiscation of the wealth built up by the more responsible citizens.
It isn’t at all clear what events would need to occur to stop the process. I the past it was either war or revolution but in modern societies that is less likely because so many have so much to lose.
This is a new stage in the development of human society such that the way forward is unpredictable.
I think the answer is likely to be a sort of quasi capitalism whereby true democracy fades away in favour of central control which involves groups of elites manipulating market forces to buy support with money taken from the masses.
A sort of convergence between the formerly free democracies and the formerly unfree authoritarian regimes.
Neither free nor slaves but some new hybrid status which will extend globally.
It won’t matter much on a day to day basis as long as the masses have enough wealth and comfort to amuse themselves quietly.
Wanting more than the ‘sufficient’ average will just be a game for the psychotics to play out between themselves.

I know this is a little late but…
recognise should be recognize
brethern should be brethren
convential should probably be conventional
I had to stare at warmmongering before I got it, but now I like it… 😀
Cheers!
Note to Mods: This post does not really contribute to the conversation, and I would not consider it badly if it were to never see the light of day. On the other hand, if WUWT has a better method of for reporting this sort of trivial stuff, you could let me know…

cta.ornl.gov/cta/research_climate.shtml
Climate Change 2007 (IPCC AR4): Mitigation of Climate Change. Chapter 5: Transport and its infrastructure (David Greene, co-lead author);
here’s just one of the resident “scientists” suckling the federal teat at the Baker Center and ORNL. My purpose in posting on the Baker Center is to pull back a curtain on what we know and what we suspect. It is not scientists and nature lovers vs a small band of skeptics. It is a massive purpose built dues ex machina corrupting science and government equally by the time tested method of dispensing money, honors, and fame. i.e Mann and Shakun.

The planet appears far more “cooler” when data manipulation and poor data collection are factored. One of the greatest problems has been south America and Africa. While the Warmists is Australia and New Zealand obligingly manipulated data to show a hockey stick effect (notably debunked in both cases), the other two continents were not so compliant. No hockey stick, no overly large temperature run up. Cooling since 2009 or so.

Of all the models used to construct the spread of predictions, which is the model statistically closest to the actual temperature track? How close is it? What are the assumptions in that model? Do they reflect reality or is it just a fluke? My guess is that it’s a fluke. That would mean all the models are rubbish at this game. So there is no point pretending they are some sort of pseudo Monte Carlo simulation against which future global temperature anomoly can be judged. The whole modelled basis of CAGW is just looks like crap.

Richard says:
April 5, 2013 at 7:23 amIn 2006 Chabibullo Abdussamatow of the Pulkovo Observatory and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences said global warming had already reached its peak and that reduced solar activity would start the Earth on a cooling phase.
Abdussamatov is already falsified: http://www.leif.org/research/Abdussa3.png
The blue line shows how TSI has actually varied.

Regardless of what is pointed out in this paper, our politicians, the establishment and our Royal Society will not accept CAGW as scientifically flawed. They are ably supported by the BBC? This has spread to all quarters, so everything that seems to be going wrong is immediately followed by much tooth sucking, and the remark “it’s ue to climate change.” No one bothers to challenge, so the stupidity continues.

In light of these developments, it’s worth asking how and when will the alarmists alter course to keep scamming public funds while maintaining a modicum of credibility. The extreme weather meme may work, but it’s subject to the vagaries of nature. There seems to be some wiggle room in previous (fine print) admissions that GCM’s do not accurately simulate cloud formations.
Such an admission would afford an opportunity to kick the can down the road by saying, “we misjudged climate sensitivity, but we are now convinced our improved models demonstrate the dire consequences of increasing CO2 concentrations”.

The graph on the right is a depiction of global temperatures as reported by The Economist (pink CO2 curve superimposed by ‘C3′).

The pink curve has been superimposed incorrectly (and the similar curve on the lefthand graph) was produced incorrectly. Basically, the CO2 curve has been scaled so that the temperature record would only follow it if the transient climate response (TCR, which is expected to be somewhat lower than the equilibrium climate sensitivity) were about 7 C per CO2 doubling. The range of TCR’s actually in the climate models used by the IPCC AR-4 are in the range of 1.2 to 2.6 C ( http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-6-2-3.html#table-8-2 ), with most lying around 1.4 to 2.2 C. So, in other words, the CO2 curve has been scaled up by a factor of somewhere more than 3 to about 5X what it ought to be in order to represent what the models predict.
The left graph is also a cherrypick: The RSS data has been picked because it shows less warming over this time period than even the UAH data set that “skeptics” used to cherrypick when it was more to their liking. That is the very definition of cherrypicking: adjusting which data you choose in order to fit a preconceived conclusion.

Tim Ball predicted 20+ years ago that the predicted catastrophic warming was not logical and the apparent warming and droughts of the 1980’s and 1990’s would end and temperatures would begin to trend the other way. How prescient he was and politically incorrect he was for his time. I remember when his views cost him his writing job at Country Guide, a farm paper printed in Canada.

Disagree entirely with your lead sentance. The fallacy of global warming hysteria is finally being exposed at the mainstream level. That’s all.
It is a HUGE issue because the political course has been set, dangerously. If cooling is as bad a threat as it seems to be (solar behavior, real 11,000 year trend, known history…):
– We will need more, scalable, real energy production (more also implies cleaner too for our lung’s sake not for the planet’s) – heat sweats, cold kills
– We will need a way to feed a planet with 7B people and rising (not burn our food thru our gas tank) – Frozen Welch Lamb anyone?
– We will need more responsive solutions to epidemics (cold, starving masses don’t make for healthy living) – See Dark Ages, then plague-infested Europe
The Issue and next steps have NEVER been more important – hardly fading:
1. We must fix our scientific engine – insist decisions are based on facts – decouple as best we can funding and political process – politicians, scientists, educators, journalists, media need to be held accountable by voters, colleagues, parents, the market, and consumers. Science has no credibility right now. Yelling “Ice” in a crowded theater would only get people to check their sodas. We still need to figure out what we’re facing, how this works, what to respond to, and nobody believes anyone.
2. The political course must be reversed. AGW related taxes need to be abolished. Senseless rules need to be repealed (e.g. burning your food at a net energy loss). Markets need to be allowed to operate to create not just energy, but real solutions. Public investments (those available) need to support technologies really required, not cronies who make solar panels. Laws need to change to allow viable land into production in a more efficient way. The health system still needs private investment with risks and returns.
This Issue has advanced to the point where we are subjected to a tyranny of the minority, self-appointed intellectual zealots and their media elite, who have put us on a truly dangerous path to a day after tomorrow where freedom is choked, markets are controlled by them, and all of our precious resources (time, wealth, and yes even environment) are squandered. The very engines of people’s ingenuity that could undoubtedly solve all our problems are being systematically shut down.
This Issue has been alive since before 1979. Global cooling in 1974 – Solution: Taxes, Regulations, Control of Energy. This is not the time for the few good people (Anthony, et Al) who have contributed so much to expose the bad science, this phony agenda, and explain what may really be happening, to raise the victory flag and say, “whew, now that’s behind us, everyone will start listening to reason.” They won’t.
People have been getting rich off this lie. They’ve made their entire careers, all their palmares are founded on this. Their sources of funding are bigger than any Big Oil, the US Treasury, Soros, etc. They are not going to quit. Ever.
This remains the biggest of all issues. Good work so far. Yea! for reason. Much left to be done. Back to work.

Box of Rocks says:
> Is the Celsius scale even accurate enough to show hundredths to begin with?
Celsius scale has nothing to do with the accuracy of temperature sensors, but your suspicion about the hundredths of 1C is correct. There are no instruments that can reliably measure hundredths within +/-50C. Even tenths are difficult to measure.

Stroud @10:39 is right. ‘Regardless” applies.
An adjustment might solve the problem. Years before 2005 should be adjusted down about .005 per year. Thus 2004 would be only .005 colder but 1994 would be .050 C colder. And 1904 would become 0.5 C colder.
Years before 1904 would not be adjusted. Who really knows what global temperatures were before that? Couldn’t 1904 have been 0.5 C colder?
This would correct the past and show that the models have underestimated warming. It is worse than we thought.
And then, even if temperatures should remain flat, the models will be close enough for another 20 years.

Psalmon:
I write to support the statements in your post at April 5, 2013 at 11:41 am which say

People have been getting rich off this lie. They’ve made their entire careers, all their palmares are founded on this. Their sources of funding are bigger than any Big Oil, the US Treasury, Soros, etc. They are not going to quit. Ever.
This remains the biggest of all issues. Good work so far. Yea! for reason. Much left to be done. Back to work.

In my view the problem is worse than you suggest.
The AGW-scare was killed at the failed 2009 IPCC Conference in Copenhagen. I said then (on WUWT and elsewhere) that the scare would continue to move as though alive in similar manner to a beheaded chicken running around a farmyard. It continues to provide the movements of life but it is already dead. And its deathly movements provide an especial problem.
Nobody will declare the AGW-scare dead: it will slowly fade away. This is similar to the ‘acid rain’ scare of the 1980s. Few remember that scare unless reminded of it but its effects still have effects; e.g. the Large Combustion Plant Directive (LCPD) exists. Importantly, the bureaucracy which the EU established to operate the LCPD still exists. And those bureaucrats justify their jobs by imposing ever more stringent, always more pointless, and extremely expensive emission limits which are causing enforced closure of UK power stations now.Bureaucracies are difficult to eradicate and impossible to nullify.
As the AGW-scare fades away those in ‘prime positions’ will attempt to establish rules and bureaucracies to impose those rules which provide immortality to their objectives. Guarding against those attempts now needs to be a serious activity.
Richard

Mark Bofill says:
April 5, 2013 at 8:49 am
“…I can just see the headlines now. CO2 Emissions Causing Climate Stagnation and several bleeding edge papers showing how we will all suffer and die as a result sometime off in the future unless emissions are cut immediately.”
*
Oh God, Mark! DON’T GIVE ‘EM IDEAS!
Point is, I think you are right! I can see them saying exactly that! Long faces, the lot – “OMG, we’ve stagnated, and it’s ALL OUR FAULT!”
I could just weep… (you did give me a smile, though). 🙂

Vince Causey says: “Expect an exceedingly long, drawn out end game.”
Not if, as I strongly suspect, Warmists resort to violence when they run out of arguments.
Stephen Wilde says: “How do we know that increased CO2 has had any effect at all?”
Well, we don’t, other than in theory (theory that greatly neglects clouds and convection). There may be some effect, but since the ice core record shows that CO2 follows temperature rise (through the well-understood mechanism of decreased CO2 solubility with increasing water temperature), it’s possible that the CO2 rise is largely due to higher ocean temperatures.
Also, higher ocean temperatures cannot be the result of a warmer atmosphere, since (1) heat transfer is minimal in that direction and (2) the seas have 1100 times as much heat capacity as the air. The tail does not wag the dog. Higher ocean temperatures are mostly due to net incident (rather than TOA) sunlight variation, not higher tropospheric temperatures and definitely not CO2.

I’m a bit sad. It’s 8:30 pm in the UK, our dinner’s burnt. My wife has just said that “what’s up with that” is “what’s up with YOU”. For over three years now, I have been so emersed in all things which make CO2 forced warming absolutely ridiculous, that I’ve become obsessed with the whole subject (probably just like Anthony). Enough is enough I feel. Am I alone in spending so much energy and devoting so many hours building factual evidence that the world is not warming up, creating analogies that CO2 has got very little to do with it . . . . when there’s so many other things that need doing around the house – the lounge could do with a makeover. If there are any phsychologists out there who can convince me that my individual battle with all the deceit about CO2 is worthwhile, then please – I am in need of reassurance. Help.

The pink curve has been superimposed incorrectly (and the similar curve on the lefthand graph) was produced incorrectly. Basically, the CO2 curve has been scaled so that the temperature record would only follow it if the transient climate response (TCR, which is expected to be somewhat lower than the equilibrium climate sensitivity) were about 7 C per CO2 doubling.

Really? I didn’t think the pink curve was scaled; I thought it was showing atmospheric CO2 per given year. I think you’re reading something into the graph that isn’t meant to be indicated.

The range of TCR’s actually in the climate models used by the IPCC AR-4 are in the range of 1.2 to 2.6 C ( http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-6-2-3.html#table-8-2 ), with most lying around 1.4 to 2.2 C. So, in other words, the CO2 curve has been scaled up by a factor of somewhere more than 3 to about 5X what it ought to be in order to represent what the models predict.

No, again I think you’re misreading it. The model predictions are the blue regions above the actual temperature line.

The left graph is also a cherrypick: The RSS data has been picked because it shows less warming over this time period than even the UAH data set that “skeptics” used to cherrypick when it was more to their liking. That is the very definition of cherrypicking: adjusting which data you choose in order to fit a preconceived conclusion.

How much average difference do you make between RSS and UAH over this time period Joel?
The graphics are fun, but this doesn’t really address the substance of the article, does it?

Mark Bofill,Here are eight (8) trend lines from the Wood For Trees data base, showing a distinct lack of global warming. It also shows the steady rise in CO2.
I have asked Joel Shore before, at what point would he admit that his CO2=AGW conjecture has ben falsified? Never got a straight answer.

Really? I didn’t think the pink curve was scaled; I thought it was showing atmospheric CO2 per given year. I think you’re reading something into the graph that isn’t meant to be indicated.

No…I think I am exposing what the person who did that was trying to do, which was to lead you to believe that there was a stark contradiction between the rise in CO2 and the behavior of the temperature. If it had been plotted with a realistic scaling between the two, then it would have been obvious that no such conclusion of such a contradiction could be drawn because the rise expected in temperature (as indicated by a realistically-scaled CO2 curve) would be small compared to the “noise” (fluctuations) in the temperature data.

The graphics are fun, but this doesn’t really address the substance of the article, does it?

I don’t see a whole lot of substance to the article. It is based on looking at temperature trends over short periods of time and, in some cases, cherrypicking the data set. And, it talks about polls of what the public thinks which, while interesting, have no bearing on the science.

dbstealey says:
April 5, 2013 at 1:49 pm
———
I’ve got to thank you actually for introducing me to WoodForTrees via your posts. The one you linked is a particularly memorable one and a favorite of mine.
At least you’ve got to give Joel credit for using his real name. I doubt any of the anonymous warmists will ever admit to having been C/AGW believers after it’s all done at all.

The debates about whether global warming exists or whether it is caused by man generated greenhouse gases or natural variability may soon become mute. A major heating fuel supply and electrical energy crisis affecting many Northern Hemisphere nations might not be far away as the planet cools to possibly the 1880-1910 or lower global temperature levels due to climate variability . We are already seeing 100 year plus cold temperature records being broken in Europe and again in UK .The global winters of 2008, 2009 2010 and regional cold spells of 2012 and 2013 were just a prelude of what is coming fast down the pike. As we saw during the cold spells of 2012/2013 winter, the extra cooling is coming partly from sudden stratospheric warming causing colder Arctic air entering into the lower latitudes plus the simultaneous cooling from other natural planet variables like a more frquent negative AO, the cooler ocean cycle from the lagged effect of low solar cycle. Many countries in the Northern Hemisphere appear to be doing the opposite in order to protect and prepare their citizens for the colder cycle by prematurely shutting down existing fossil fuel generating plants , restricting the building of new ones and restricting the use of fossil fuel generally . That is similar to removing your furnace and oil storage tank before the onset of winter with no other reliable alternate to see one through the winter Wind and solar will be of little help in most areas due to the extreme winters, winter clouds and significant snow. It is sheer suicide and we can already see many actual examples of this throughout the Northern Hemisphere and currently more notably in UK and Eastern Europe. Now North American nations are being urged by environmentalists who only think about global warming to do the same. Germany, China and India may escape some of the worst heating problems as they seem to retain their former fossil fuel plants and are continuing to build new ones, I also see winters starting to get further cooler as early as 2014/2015 winter and going to 2035 so this problem will be with us for some time to come..

son of mulder says:
April 5, 2013 at 10:07 am
Of all the models used to construct the spread of predictions, which is the model statistically closest to the actual temperature track? How close is it? What are the assumptions in that model? Do they reflect reality or is it just a fluke? My guess is that it’s a fluke. That would mean all the models are rubbish at this game. So there is no point pretending they are some sort of pseudo Monte Carlo simulation against which future global temperature anomoly can be judged. The whole modelled basis of CAGW is just looks like crap.
————–
The closest model would be Hansen’s scenario C. It includes the assumption that human CO2 emissions STOPPED in 2000. The temperature is currently running just below that model, implying that CO2 has little effect on warming.

Psalmon says:
April 5, 2013 at 11:41 am
“2. The political course must be reversed. AGW related taxes need to be abolished. Senseless rules need to be repealed (e.g. burning your food at a net energy loss). Markets need to be allowed to operate to create not just energy, but real solutions. Public investments (those available) need to support technologies really required, not cronies who make solar panels. Laws need to change to allow viable land into production in a more efficient way. The health system still needs private investment with risks and returns.”
and
richardscourtney says:
April 5, 2013 at 12:19 pm
“…Bureaucracies are difficult to eradicate and impossible to nullify.
“As the AGW-scare fades away those in ‘prime positions’ will attempt to establish rules and bureaucracies to impose those rules which provide immortality to their objectives. Guarding against those attempts now needs to be a serious activity.”
*
Totally agree with you both in all you said.
It is vital – the world over – to get rid of the DISEASE behind the symptom that is alarmism and anti-capitalism. We need to protect our societies from the enemy within. We need to protect our technology, too. If we are headed into a little ice age – or a bigger one – it’s technology and fossil fuel that will see us survive and adapt.

You know, maybe I need to have my eyes checked Joel, but it doesn’t look to me like RSS shows less warming over that time period. If anything, it looks to me as if UAH generally runs a bit cooler than RSS, not that I think there’s a whole lot of difference there. What do you think?

joeldshore says:
April 5, 2013 at 2:10 pm
…
No…I think I am exposing what the person who did that was trying to do, which was to lead you to believe that there was a stark contradiction between the rise in CO2 and the behavior of the temperature. If it had been plotted with a realistic scaling between the two, then it would have been obvious that no such conclusion of such a contradiction could be drawn because the rise expected in temperature (as indicated by a realistically-scaled CO2 curve) would be small compared to the “noise” (fluctuations) in the temperature data.
————
Nice play on the graph Joel. Yup, that was one diabolical cherry pick, considering the graph doesn’t show the trend lines at all.
Personally, I think they just wanted to graphically demonstrate the increase in CO2, and the fact that the actual temperatures are about to fall out of the model confidence intervals. I don’t think looking at UAH instead of RSS is going to make much difference in that Joel, but if you think it will, well, more power to you I guess.

joeldshore says:
April 5, 2013 at 2:10 pm: “…It is based on looking at temperature trends over short periods of time…”
Well then, let’s look at T and CO2 trends over, say, 550 million years. That says that what is going on over the last 30 years is inconsequential, and in fact, is working from the lowest starting point, perhaps, in the last half billion years.

” Anthony Scalzi says:
April 5, 2013 at 2:45 pm
The closest model would be Hansen’s scenario C. It includes the assumption that human CO2 emissions STOPPED in 2000. The temperature is currently running just below that model, implying that CO2 has little effect on warming.”
If Model C was adjusted to include CO2 growth from 2000 it would undoubtedly deviate significantly from actual temperature anomoly in a higher direction. That would prove only that the model is crap. As such it implies nothing about CO2.

THis from the spectator probably the MOST crucial point ht to writer’s name missing maybe if AW can find it. Anyway Joe bastardi called him his hero LOL
“The IPCC climate fraud hinges on the concept of ‘back radiation’, supposedly an energy flux from atmosphere to surface. This mistake has existed for 50 years or so.
They claim that when a temperature is converted by the Stefan-Boltzmann equation to the potential energy flux the emitter could transfer to a body at absolute zero, it is real. However, this contradicts Maxwell’s Equations. Only when the radiation field meets another and interferes destructively does real energy transfer occur. Many, perhaps most physical scientists wrongly consider this potential energy as a ‘photon stream’.
In reality, the field from atmospheric GHGs annihilates surface IR emission in those bands – there can be no CO2-AGW. This destroys the contorted ‘back radiation’ argument of which there is no experimental proof. That is an element of faith, the 39 Articles in one designed to persuade the acolytes to support the windmill cult.
I’ll give you an example of their contorted reasoning. Deserts cool at night more than humid regions. The CO2 acolytes think it’s because less water vapour means less ‘back radiation’, so deserts cool more. The reality is IR from the surface to space via the ‘atmospheric window’ cools the surface. In humid regions water vapour condenses, dew, frost or fog. The latent heat evolution offsets radiative heat loss. In deserts, you have to cool much more before there is condensation and the surface can get to well below zero.
This religion, bad science like ‘phlogiston’, has existed since Houghton published his treatise on Atmospheric Physics in 1977; 3 bad mistakes. He is allegedly very religious, a bit like Priestley with phlogiston. Fake ‘back radiation’ is used by Common Purpose to indoctrinate acolytes, Scientology Lite. This is why some want to kill unbelievers.
We have to deprogramme them, like deprogramming Scientologists or Moonies.”

And somehow, among all the billions spent on global warming research, not much money seems to have made its way to the enormous international effort that would be required to ensure the accurate and consistent measurement of global temperatures.
This cuts to the core of the scandal – it was never about actually wanting to know what is really happening with global climate – instead just manufacturing an illusory story. At the end of the cold war – which the liberofascists exploited to make science criminally uncool but at the same time posture themselves as the worlds approved climate scientists – there followed a massive fall-off of weather monitoring stations which has not been addressed. This betrays the lack of any real desire to understand climate – just a need to fabricate an AGW edifice of “perception”.

lsvalgaard says:
April 5, 2013 at 10:11 am
Richard says:
April 5, 2013 at 7:23 am
In 2006 Chabibullo Abdussamatow of the Pulkovo Observatory and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences said global warming had already reached its peak and that reduced solar activity would start the Earth on a cooling phase.Abdussamatov is already falsified: http://www.leif.org/research/Abdussa3.png
The blue line shows how TSI has actually varied.
Abdussamatov predicted global cooling starting 2016. It is now 2013. In what sense can this prediction already be falsified?

phlogiston says:
April 5, 2013 at 4:44 pmAbdussamatov predicted global cooling starting 2016. It is now 2013. In what sense can this prediction already be falsified?
The ‘prediction’ is based on the projected course of TSI [taking a nose dive]. TSI has not decreased as predicted, hence the extrapolation is not warranted.

marcvsbarcvs
Now can others see why I have been cursing and screaming, ranting and raving here intermittently for months about the cold I have had to endure because I cannot afford heating bills inflated by green b!$%Ar^s. why I say its a life or death issue. Why I so viscerally hate these “environmentalist” fascist scum. In someways they are the equivalent of a Western Taleban.
I think now is the time to talk up their inhumanity and ethical iniquity. Its time to step beyond the settling of pseudo-science in a stout steel-toe-capped pair of rhetorical Doc Martins.

Psalmon
You are quite right to point to the shocking absence of any public discussion on the implications of rapid climate cooling. We are about on time for the end of the current interglacial in terms of the precession cycle etc. E.M.Smith, an important contributor here argues that this descent will be so gradual as to be un-noticeable. However his calculation assumed a linear T decrease over tens of millenia. Ice core data suggest initial “sharp” drops of one or several degrees per century might occur at an end-interglacial.
There is an apparent corellation between global temperatures, temp change and economic growth. The sad fact is that much of our economy depends on pointless shopping – going out and buying stuff we dont really need. Pointless shopping (PS) happens more when it is warm and sunny than in cold, wet weather.
From the 70s till about 2006 there were on average slightly more sunny days each year, and the world got used to the consequent economic growth, over-borrowing based on assuming continued growth of PS. However now that global temps have levelled off and weather seems to be getting less conducive of PS, all the built in models of growth, borrowing and repayment are coming apart.
Cooling climate could already be contributing to the current economic stagnation and debt crisis.
BTW – do you work at Bath Univ, UK? I am also a P Salmon (Phil) but hide behind the name phlogiston. I did my PhD at Bristol Univ but now work in Belgium.

“And The Economist and their mainstream press brethern are not alone in challenging the failed AGW orthodoxy … what The Economist is essentially reporting — global warming has gone AWOL…The mainstream press, as represented by The Economist, and other proponents of conventional climate orthodoxy are moving closer to the AGW skeptics’ (lukewarmers’) position”

The above spin, applied heavily to The Economist article, is hard to reconcile with what it actually said. The subtitle of the article was, after all:

The climate may be heating up less in response to greenhouse-gas emissions than was once thought. But that does not mean the problem is going away.

See the part where they say “that does not mean the problem is going away” . I don’t know, but it sounds like they are saying it does not mean the problem is going away. Which sort of implies they think it is a problem too. One that is not going away.
Or later when talking about temperature trends, they say

“It does not mean global warming is a delusion.”

Contrast that with comments typically posted around here. Or how about the article’s concluding paragraph:

“Since CO₂ accumulates in the atmosphere, this could increase temperatures compared with pre-industrial levels by around 2°C even with a lower sensitivity and perhaps nearer to 4°C at the top end of the estimates. Despite all the work on sensitivity, no one really knows how the climate would react if temperatures rose by as much as 4°C. Hardly reassuring.”

It is a long, long, long way from The Economist saying “A small reduction in estimates of climate sensitivity would seem to be justified to all of the statements up at the top of this blog post that The Economist article is supposedly supporting. I hope everyone actually reads the entire article for themselves.

Mark Bofill says: “I think they’ve come a ways.”
People here may like that narrative, but the words being written in The Economist don’t support it. Look at the ‘Leaders’ section that introduced the article:

“If climate policy continues to be this impotent, then carbon-dioxide levels could easily rise so far that even a low-sensitivity planet will risk seeing changes that people would sorely regret. There is no plausible scenario in which carbon emissions continue unchecked and the climate does not warm above today’s temperatures.”

Box of Rocks says:
April 5, 2013 at 9:34 am
Is the Celsius scale even accurate enough to show hundredths to begin with?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
NOanalysis of error

Australian temperature records shoddy, inaccurate, unreliable….
…An independent audit team has just produced a report showing that as many as 85 -95% of all Australian sites in the pre-Celsius era (before 1972) did not comply with the BOM’s own stipulations. The audit shows 20-30% of all the measurements back then were rounded or possibly truncated. Even modern electronic equipment was at times, so faulty and unmonitored that one station rounded all the readings for nearly 10 years…

Each data point in the temperature is a single data point. It is not a multiple measurement of the temperature of the same bit of air at the same time. Therefore you can not get any more accuracy by averaging as you could with multiple measurements of the same attribute.
Think measuring the length of a specific board twenty times vs measuring several boards from different lumber manufacturers. Measuring different boards with different tape measures only tells you how well the manufacturers of the tape measures and boards hold tolerances. It tells you nothing more about the actual length of the first board than the original measurement did.

@ Jeff Alberts says:
April 6, 2013 at 8:24 pm
It is remarkable how some people can, in an instant, reveal themselves.
This is always something seen in those of little complexity and no profundity in their character and consequently no insight or even meaningful intelligence in anything they state.
As is the case here. With you.
Having scoured the body of comments for opportunities you land on this. You have once encountered the word “moot” and think, in your ignorance, you can show this nominal familiarity whilst at the same time laying claim to a febrile superiority.
You got it wrong. You are a fool. An exceptionally trivial, petty fool.
And no, this is not an example of the infamous “ad hom”, it is a clinical description.

@Mark Bofill says:
April 5, 2013 at 7:49 am and others.
For this theme, varied as required, not to be persistent, it is necessary to do more than simply disprove it by weight of evidence.
Unless the root causes, which might be called cultural, but which I think could also be described as existential – in compromising of values, utility of intelligence and the like – are seen and repudiated, then structurally the course set will prevail.

jc says:
April 7, 2013 at 4:38 am
———
I agree. Sometimes I use the word ‘philosophical’ to identify the root causes you’re referring to, but only occasionally and cautiously, as the use of the word ‘philosophical’ seems to be an invitation to people to stop listening seriously and start pie in the sky B.S.ing. 🙂

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